Scraping For Scraps, Part 1

Compared to most of my friends' refrigerators, our is always bare. No, we aren't starving. Their fridges are packed with bowls and containers of left-overs they dutifully pack up after every meal, then toss in the trash two weeks later. Our fridge contains just the basics--milk, eggs, juice, butter, etc.--because we re-use all of our scrap food. Yep, we're scavengers, bottom feeders, vultures. Not a scrap of food goes to waste at our house. First of all, the best way to control the amount of left-overs is to not have them in the first place. I've evaluated my family's eating habits to determine how much each of them typically eats. that way, I can try to make just enough food for a meal. But, of course, it doesn't always work according to plan. We do get our share of left-overs. Here are some idea we use to recycle our scraps. I swear I used to dump out a gallon of milk a week because my daughters wouldn't finish their milk at dinner. Now I save their left-over dinner milk to pour on their cereal in the morning. I use colored cups to make sure they don't get each others milk--Katie's cup is pink and Abbie's is yellow. They know to use their "cereal milk" for their breakfast cereal. My youngest daughter, Abbie, loves bananas but she's notorious for eating only half or two-thirds of the banana, wasting the rest. Now I take her uneaten bits of banana, however small, and freeze it for future banana bread. I keep a zipper baggie in the freezer and whenever Abbie has some left-over banana, I add it to the baggie and mush it up. When the baggie is full, it's about the right amount of mushed bananas for a loaf of banana bread. We eat a lot of ham and chicken. Any bit of left-over meat, however small, gets ground up in my food processor (my favorite appliance). Like the bananas, I keep baggies in the freezer for chicken and ham scraps. When there is enough, I make up chicken salad or ham salad for my husband's lunches. The "baggie in the freezer" plan also works for left-over fruit, too. Any fruit that's left-overs gets chopped up and put in the baggie. I mix all kinds of fruit together. I make popsicles when the baggie gets full. I mix the frozen fruit with a small amount of yogurt and freeze it popsicle cups. My girls love the fruit and yogurt popsicles

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